The Hermit
by Robert5
Summary: In one of the Jon Pertwee adventures, I think it might have been "Frontier in Space" but I could be mistaken - the Doctor told part of this story to Jo Grant. I decided to tell the rest of it.


The small house to which the boy walked was built on a grey rock. Grey like so many others of the rocks on southern Gallifrey.  
  
The landscape was bleak, cold, and wet. The temperature was near freezing - and only by burning the peat-like deposits that still existed in the ground, were the indigenous people of the region able to stay alive in the cold. The boy was slowly walking home the durkon - the four-footed pack beast that bore leather satchels filled with the peat. On the cold landscape there were bushes and shrubs, and there was snow everywhere that was now becoming dirty and muddy with the rain, but there was hardly a tree in sight.  
  
The house was built at the bottom of a hill. The boy had never ventured to the other side of the hill - but he had been told by his parents what lay beyond it. There lived an old man there, they said, who had lived for years in isolation in this bleak and dismal place, and had learned the secret of life.  
  
The boy thought hardly a thing about this. He didn't need to know what the secret of life was - he had all he needed with his parents, and the teacher to whom he traveled each day with the durkon, to learn about the world of books, and the world that existed outside of this place that he had lived in all his life.  
  
Maybe the world was not so pretty, but he had all he needed, and he was content.  
  
His teacher had told him about what lay many thousands of miles to the north of where they lived. He had taught him about the fabulous Citadel of the Time Lords, who ruled Gallifrey, and had powers unimaginably beyond that of the common Gallifreyans. The power to travel through time and space to anywhere in the universe and at any time in its history. The power to transform their bodies and take on whole new physical forms. Neither the boy, nor his parents, nor even his teacher had ever seen the Citadel, or even a Time Lord. It was a different world - a distant, fairy-tale like world. It had no relation - no connection to the simple world that they knew.  
  
The Gallifreyan sun was now beginning to set, hidden by cloud, and dusk was slowly falling. As they boy approached his home, he was surprised to hear voices coming from inside. One voice he recognised to be that of his teacher, the others that of his parents, and the third a voice he did not recognise.  
  
Quickly and silently the boy brought the durkon into the house and tethered the beast. There were only two rooms to the house - one in which the durkon slept, along with the family, and the other the room for eating. It was from the other room that the sounds of conversation came.  
  
Silently, and staying in the deepening shadows where he could not be seen, the boy peered round the door, into the room beyond. The fire was already burning in the centre of the room - its smoke going up through the hole in the roof, and the flickering light illuminated the clothes and faces of the three men who had come to visit his parents.  
  
Both sat on the floor, as there were no chairs in the house. The boy recognised his teacher immediately - but the two other men were like no people the boy had ever seen before. His heart thudded as he saw them, for he knew immediately where they had come from.  
  
One man, who was speaking, wore long, brilliant silk robes, ornately decorated, and beautiful to see. Besides him sat a man in a red and white tunic, trousers and boots, who wore, strapped to his hip, a weapon the likes of which they boy had never seen. A red and white helmet was placed by his side.  
  
The robed man was saying, "Both of you, my honourable people, are blessed beyond what you can ever have dreamed of. For your son has been chosen."  
  
"Chosen for what?" the boy's mother asked, in a frightened voice.  
  
"He has shown abilities in mathematics and logical reasoning that excel that of the average Gallifreyan," the man continued. "His powers pass beyond the normal parameters that define the place of the masses of the inhabitants of our planet, and they place him among the potentially elite."  
  
There was silence. Then, the boy's father spoke, saying, "Tell me, lord, are you saying that my son will..."  
  
"Yes," the man said gently. "If he desires, and if he does indeed prove to have not only the potential, but the endurance, and the discipline to face the long and difficult years that will come, he will take his place among us in the Citadel. He will be a Time Lord."  
  
There was another great silence, in which the boy could hear nothing but his heart that thudded as if it would alert the adults who spoke. It was the boy's mother who now broke that silence.  
  
"But if this is so my lord, it means - it means..."  
  
"Yes," the Time Lord said, in his silkily soft voice, "he will be taken from you. He will be taken to live in our Citadel, and there he will study night and day, for years in the Academy, learning the great equations that hold our secrets - that define our powers - the powers to control the universe. He will know the laws of the cosmos that we bend and tame to our will to enable us to travel anywhere we desire, if the High Council permits it. He will learn of the great ethics, laws, and enormous responsibilities by which a Time Lord must live his life. And..."  
  
"What?" the boy's mother asked in a shaky whisper, as darkness increased, and only the yellow flicker of the fire illuminated their faces.  
  
"If he is successful - and he does indeed become a Time Lord - at the end of his training he will receive an infusion of the energy of the Eye of Harmony - our legacy from Rassilon the great - and before him still, from Omega - our greatest hero. With that energy, if ever his body is mortally destroyed by age, or sickness, or injury, he will have the power to regenerate it - to save his life by taking on a new, perfect physical form. Do you not desire such a destiny for your son?"  
  
The boy's father looked outside the tiny window of the hut, at the bleak landscape beyond, falling into darkness. Then he said, slowly, "Yes." And he held in his arms his wife, who wept.  
  
With his two Gallifreyan hearts beating like wild drums, the boy retreated back into the adjacent room, and lay down, shivering, next to the durkon. So this was his future. To live in the wondrous world of the Time Lords - to become one of them. He had never imagined - had never dreamed that such was to be his destiny. And he was afraid.  
  
What was his world now? The only world he had ever known had been that of his mother and father, and this tiny place on the grey rock. Now, he knew that he would have it no longer. For him, the future was nothing but vague fairy tales, and a world in which he would know no one, in which he knew of no friends.  
  
He lay still, pretending sleep, as the men departed. He heard his mother look in. Believing him to be asleep, she walked softly to him, knelt beside him, and stroked his hair, and kissed his forehead. Though half-closed lids, he could see the tears on her cheeks, glistening in the fading firelight from the other room. She lifted the coarse blanket of spun durkon wool, and covered him with it, before lying down to sleep herself. The boy's father lay down himself, and soon both his parents were sleeping.  
  
But the boy lay awake. A tremendous feeling of loss flooded him. Occasionally he would drift into a restless sleep - only to wake of a sudden, and be aware of the darkness inside him - the feeling of despair - like a great dark well into which he was falling. All of a sudden, the world he knew and loved had been torn from him, and he didn't know what to do.  
  
The crackle of the fire, and its pale yellow light slowly faded. It grew colder as the small hours of the Gallifreyan night crept on. The boy pulled his blanket tighter around him, and shivered - he shivered with the external cold of the night, and with another, deep cold from within.  
  
Slowly, the pale blue light of dawn crept into the house. With heavy hearts, the boy rose and cast aside the blankets. He got up and pulled on his heavy, woolen coat, and stepped outside. In the east, a pale lemon glow came from a bank of thinner clouds. The boy's breath billowed in great clouds. The air was icy, but there was no falling snow - spots of rain were falling, and the boy could see much snow on the ground, from the snowfall of four days ago, becoming wetter and sludgier as it melted, and mixed more with the rain and dirt. A bitter, cold wind was howling over the bleak plain, hurling the raindrops like ice-cold needles into the boy's skin. The young man stood there, engulfed in the darkness of his mind, that seemed as hopeless, and as despairing, as this sad land in which he lived.   
  
The boy looked to the hill. Behind the hill, the mountains rose, looking rugged and grey and lonesome. And suddenly, he knew what he must do.  
  
In the still half-light, that only gradually was increasing as the planet turned its hidden face towards its sun, the boy began to stride up the hill, pulling his coat around him to protect him from the rain and the bitter cold. The going was hard, but he kept going resolutely - up the old, ruined mountain path that would lead up and over the hill - and to what lay beyond - the hermit's house.  
  
He looked back only once - and saw his own home sitting perched on the rocks looking tiny in the distance he had created. Then he turned and moved on. It was hard going - and it grew harder and harder as the path grew steeper. The rocks were both wet, and icy - for what rain had fallen on the path had frozen during the night - making the path treacherously slippery. Several times the poor boy fell on the rocks, badly grazing his hands. The wind howled over him as he lay there - almost too miserable to get up again.  
  
Yet he always did - his face, feet and hands soiled with the grey mud and snow. And he kept going on - and on.  
  
Then, suddenly, below him he saw it - a tiny hut that he knew to be the hermit's house. He stumbled down to it.  
  
The hermit was sitting on a rock outside his home, gazing expressionlessly into space. As the boy drew close to him, he saw that almost every trace of fat or muscle seemed to be gone from his body and face. The old man made no attempt to warm himself with more than the very thin cloak he wore, and the skin hung from the bones of his face.  
  
The boy sat in front of the old man, and talked. He told the hermit about how he had returned home last night - about the man - the Time Lord - who had visited, and about how he was to be sent away to this strange, alien place known as the Citadel - and of the despair this brought to his heart.  
  
The boy spoke with no tears - for his sadness was beyond tears. Finally, when he had finished, he and the old man sat staring wordlessly into each other's eyes.  
  
And then - the old main raised his hand, and pointed a skeleton finger at something behind the boy. The boy turned, and saw a pathetic, weak looking flower, no taller than the old man's finger, that clung to the rock.  
  
For a moment, the boy did not understand - he saw only a sad, yellow flower. But then...  
  
He saw that no matter what happened to it, no matter how cold, or wet, or windy of icy the weather of this bleak place was, it would never stop being there to shine its tiny yellow spark of happiness on whoever saw it. Something had placed it there to show to everyone that there was always light in the world, if one only chose to take hold of it.  
  
And then, suddenly - that tiny flower burst into colour. Vibrant golden waves erupted out of it, and filled the boy with a feeling of lion-strength - a feeling of warm energy from the glorious source of all life.  
  
He turned and climbed back up over the hill. As he reached its crest, the Gallifreyan sun broke from its hidden bank of clouds, and spilled gold across the grey landscape, bringing it to life. Birds sang in the sky - myriads of colours suddenly flared in the rocks that the boy had never seen before. Reds and golds and purples. And the patches of snow on the rocks were shining white - and the frost of the night sparkled like a horde of diamonds.  
  
The boy ran. He ran and ran across the sunlit plain as if he would embrace all the universe and sing forever with a heart that was bursting with joy. For he knew that life was good and wonderful, and he would always find joy in it wherever he went among all the planets of the universe, throughout all time and space.  
  
And so it was with a radiant heart that the boy who would grow to be the Doctor came home. 


End file.
